Still, there were times when even Stalin backed down. "Sometimes, if you persistently opposed Stalin and if he became convinced you were right, he would retreat from his position and accept yours...But unfortunately, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he displayed this virtue. More often than not, if Stalin decided you should do something- intelligent or stupid, helpful or harmful- he made you do it. And you did it."
"Stalin had been barking orders ever since the annihilation of the basic staff of the Central Committee which had been elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress [of 1934]." As a result, Khrushchev and the other insiders became "accustomed to the practice that if you weren't told something, you didn't ask...Information was carefully selected, limited, and weighed by Stalin before it was passed on to the Politbureau. He had no right to do this, according to the Party Statutes. The fact that he did it anyway was another manifestation of the arbitrary rule which acquired the aspect of law under Stalin."
Once he had achieved absolute power, Stalin was determined to protect it from plotting enemies. Along with his cruelty, Stalin is probably most renowned for his paranoia. He was convinced that there were millions of people- within the Party, within the country and also outside the USSR- scheming to usurp his throne and to steer the country away from the path his inspired genius had chosen. This paranoia so consumed him that, along with his ruthless ambition, it was responsible for the deaths of literally millions of people.
Examples of this paranoia are the most chilling part of Khrushchev's memoirs. "It all depended on Stalin's fertile imagination, who was an agent on what imperialistic country from one day to the next." Khrushchev, like the other insiders, was unable to spot these countless 'enemies'. "We blamed ourselves for being blind to the presence of enemies all around us." Lacking Stalin's genius, they "were therefore unable to discern enemies in our midst the way Stalin could."
